Three quarters of the time

CPOs spend 74% of their time on transactional and operational rather than strategic work, and what holds true at the top holds even more for their teams. I mentioned that figure in my first Friday note. Since then, I keep coming back to one question: Why has procurement accepted this ratio for so long?

The problem isn't new. When I started working in strategic procurement more than 25 years ago, people were already saying procurement had to become more strategic: less time on data gathering and Excel, more time for suppliers, for challenging specifications, for decisions with measurable impact, to earn that "seat at the table" (the topic of my first BME Symposium in 2001). The level of digitalization has changed since then. The ratio hasn't, at least not enough.

Even at the highest-performing organizations, the share of time CPOs have to spend on transactional and operational tasks is still 63%. (Source: Deloitte, 2025 Global Chief Procurement Officer Survey)

That's remarkable. Not because procurement teams haven't worked hard enough, and not because companies haven't invested in technology. Neither is true. The more interesting explanation: most improvements have made individual steps more efficient without changing how analytical, intellectually demanding work gets done in the first place.

An example: a supplier announces a price increase. Before procurement can respond, someone has to pull together the contract and price adjustment clause, historical prices, volumes, the right material index, the product's cost structure, past negotiations and alternatives, and then calculate the impact. The decision might take ten minutes. The preparation often takes days. A category strategy works the same way, just on a larger scale: it isn't the strategic decision that eats up the time, it's building the fact base, often over weeks. And as long as the facts aren't solid, aligning with stakeholders drags on for months.

That's why simply adding headcount barely moves the ratio. It increases throughput. But as long as every new analysis needs the same manual steps, output grows linearly with headcount at best. That's capacity. Not scalability.

And that becomes a problem, because demand for strategic work in procurement grows faster than the organization can grow with it: more suppliers, more regulatory requirements, more sustainability data, more volatile markets, on a budget that rarely grows in proportion. So we prioritize: the most important suppliers, the biggest categories. The rest waits. That isn't poor management. It's rational capacity allocation, and it's exactly why the 1,027 suppliers from my last note remain largely untouched. The same goes for knowledge: a category manager knows their category because they've spent years building up context in their head, and the organization can't replicate that context manually for every category. Under the existing model, that's a rational decision. But the model can change.

I've essentially seen three responses to this 74% problem:

• More people. I think it increases capacity and is often necessary, but it doesn't change the economics of how analytical, strategic work gets done. Besides, every new hire needs months to build up the company and product context and the domain knowledge for a category.
• More tools. I think procurement isn't short of systems: ERP, source-to-pay, contract management, spend analytics. Each of them makes its part of the process more efficient. But the real analytical work begins exactly where the individual system ends: bringing data together from multiple silos, cleaning it and interpreting it. And that work stays with the buyer.
• More dashboards. I think they're excellent at showing what has already been structured. They rarely tell you what to do next and why it matters.

All three share the same underlying pattern: they optimize the existing workflow. Someone still has to ask the question, gather the context, combine the data and translate it into a decision. The work gets incrementally faster. But at its core, it stays the same.

What I haven't seen often enough is a procurement function where entire repetitions of analytical work disappear instead of just getting faster. If a market analysis has been done once, it shouldn't be rebuilt from scratch. If a supplier has been analyzed, its history should stay available and keep growing. If a should-cost model exists, the next question should start with the updated model, not a blank spreadsheet. And if a methodology works, it should be executable across hundreds of suppliers without needing hundreds of people to apply it by hand.

That's exactly where the ratio starts to shift. Not because buyers type faster, but because less has to be typed at all. Not because the organization employs an endless number of category managers, but because one of them can work with the kind of leverage that used to take a whole team. And not because strategy gets automated away. Quite the opposite: automation should create more room for judgment, for supplier conversations, for negotiations, for deciding which risks matter and where a deeper analysis is worth it.

That was one of the central questions behind Elevatry: What happens when procurement doesn't have to start from a blank page every time, when data, methodological knowledge and past analytical work stay available, while procurement professionals stay exactly where they create the most value: deciding, challenging, negotiating?

Elevatry went live on Monday. We describe the path as Visibility → Decisions → Execution → Impact, deliberately in that order. Visibility alone isn't strategic procurement, and a decision that never gets implemented creates no value either. The system has to carry the work forward, from spotting an issue to learning from the outcome.

That's why I don't believe in "AI instead of buyers," but in an organization where experienced people no longer spend their time rebuilding the analytical foundation they need to put that experience to use. The question isn't whether AI makes a buyer 20% faster. The more interesting questions are: What would procurement look like if 74% suddenly became 50%, or 30%? What would strategic procurement look like if spend were managed with even more value levers and coverage of actively managed spend rose by 5, 10 or 15 percentage points?

The future of procurement won't be decided by how many tasks we can squeeze into the same working week, but by how much of today's work won't have to be redone tomorrow.

This week's question for my network of procurement experts: If your team got two days a week back tomorrow, what would you use them for?

I welcome every comment!

— Heiko, founder of Elevatry. 25 years of strategic procurement. My next note will be published on October 9: The best source is rarely at the top of the search results.